Hmm. Well, that would be a dramatic exit...but there's no way I want to last to age 95, Stilly. Uh-uh. I leave that to those who are so afraid of death that they'll put up with absolutely anything to avoid it one more day and remain here... ;-) Not me.

Well, maybe you just never found the right hant, Still!! You ain't been thoroughly and properly haunted 'til I start romping through your dreams. You start waking up shivering in galactic joy and smelling like persimmon, you'll know whose been floating through!! Mmmmmmmm-hmmmmm!!!!! LOL!!!

Actually I have no idea whether I would be a really good hant or not. I don't recall ever trying t before. But you know, presumption is nine parts of the law, or whatever.

Well, you never know until you try. Red Rogers said that the other night up at the Hovel. He was trying to drink Boozy Hawkes under the table, had twenty bucks riding on it. And Red did it, too. In fact, them was Red's last words: "You never know until you try." Boozy passed out and Red passed on. Now they can't keep any Three Roses whiskey in the Hovel; it was Red's favorite and every bottle they have turns up empty. Folks are pretty sure Red's still hanging around, still drinking, not knowing that he won the bet. Boozy is still passed out, a big smile on his face and a bigger puddle around his midsection.

They're talking about getting Padre Sky Pilot (he's Shoshone and that's his real name) to talk to Red, ask him to move on if you will. Thing is, Padre himself is sort of uncorporeal, since HE croaked about sixty years back and ever since has just sat at one of the tables playing solitaire. Padre never liked booze, just solitaire, so saving the Three Roses supply won't be a big thing with him. Also, folks have noticed that his solitaire game has very recently turned into double solitaire.

AHa! What is it draws you there, in spite of your best scruples? What unresolved karma, what mystic beam remaining energized by lost love or buried hatred, pulls you to that din of inequity as the squalling of a bad Klezmer band draws the innocent teenaged moth?

You'll be in spirit rather than in yer old worn-out body, ya doofus! ;-)

As for being in people's dreams...you were in one of mine a couple of nights ago. We were back in the 17th century in France for some reason and you were being a real cad. Matter of fact, you insulted a lady most grievously! I think she may have been an earlier incarnation of Winona Ryder. So I took you outside and we had at it with our dueling foils and I gave you a terrible thrashing, but stopped short of sending you precipitately into the afterlife, as it were. Quite noble of me to do that, I think. I'm surprised that you have no memory of those events, but I've heard that the human psyche tends to blank out more embarrassing dream episodes.

HA. That was no lady--that was the earlier incarnation of Chinga. I remember the lifetime well--you were a suacy, sophomoric young prat who had been spoiled rotten by an overindulgent stepmother. Chinga was trying to lure you into the white slave trade, as a victim, for which she stood to gain a pretty penny from the shipowner who stood ready to whisk you away to a lifetime of degradation as a serf in some remote Pasha's court. I called her game and she played the offended decency of womanhood card, protesting overmuch though guilty as sin, which, in your inexperienced naivete, you fell for completely. So you challenged me, and as you say, we set to with foils, since you would not listen to reason and I had to get you out of there to avoid the waiting bosn's crew who were standing by to knock you senseless and smuggle you off to Timbuctu.

The reason you didn't finish me off is the last-second stroke with my good right arm, 1 which knocked you rapier tip over foil into the moat, following which, in complete disgust at your mawkish ways, I bopped you over the bean and threw you over my pommel and rode off to town, and sold you to the ship's master myself, and made a pretty penny on it, I don't mind telling you.

Ha! Ever the glib scoundrel, reinventing the events of the past to clothe himself in unearned glory, reveling in totally false tales of his martial exploits and derring do. Ah...but if I were to tell of the time that I had to rescue you from not five, not four, not even three or two, but from ONE scrawny 12 year old urchin from the Paris slums who had backed you into a corner wielding nothing more than a zucchini! Yes, a zucchini, and a smallish zuchinni at that, and you armed with a good rapier too. Shocking! But I kept it a secret, didn't I? I could have told every musketeer in the length and breadth of France, but I protected your good name...God knows it wasn't much, but it was all you had. It was my compassion for my fellow man and my true love for a comrade that moved me on that occasion....that and the fifty gold pieces that you gave me in gratitude for saving you from total public humiliation.

Shortly after that you were taken, alas, into the employ of the Baron de Schelly and you all went off on that ill-advised escapade in Flanders where, I am told, you were forced to walk nude through the streets following the catastrophic defeat of your patron's forces, and then placed in the stocks where the citizens could mock you and hurl refuse at your privy parts. Fortunately, due to the fact that you were well known to be far more dangerous to your own side than to the enemy, you were shortly thereafter released and repatriated back to Beaugency where you took on a promising career as an informant and petty thief, having failed totally as a soldier.

Were you guys fencing with foils, which are blunted practice weapons, or rapiers, which are sharp pointy things? If foils neither of you was in much danger unless you fell and poked an eye out or something (you know Mom doesn't want you running with those things!).

Of course, I can't imagine either of you in much danger with rapiers, either:

LOL! Well, I find all this quite amusing, I must say. I note, though, that my opponent, scurvy knave that he is, has slunk off into the shadows, reduced to impotent silence by the devastating revelations set forth in my previous post. Poor fellow. I may have gone too far. But I trust he will recover in due course of time and regale us with further tales of self-glorification, pomp, and unmlikely circumstance.

My foil was a rapier, which explains M. Hawk's unlikely circumcision. It is well known that in the presence of overwhelming force, the bedraggled and beaten-down mind (see LH's previous entry) resorts to laying in fantasies more easy to confront that dark reality. Hence Mister Hawk's small zucchini, which you may analyze for yourself as to the obsessions which would give rise, so to speak, to such an unlikely delusion. Freud (not to mention his student Liebenscheiss) would be quite intrigued.

MWahaha!! Mighty? Like, perhaps, the renowned mouse by the same name? Your zucchini, sir, will long remember the precise circular purple scar around it's full .75-inch diameter. Consider yourself fortunate I saved you all the awkward explanations of how you came to have a Zed emblazoned on the tip.

I'm just trying to figure out what exactly happened. So, okay: Amos carved a "Z" on the end of LH's smallishly large (or largishly small) zucchini and this circumcised the zucchini. Somehow this left a purplish scar or something on either the zucchini or LH; most likely on LH because I can't think of how a purplish scar can appear on a vegetable that is green on the outside and white on the inside (unless Amos used a dye of some sort, which gives a whole new color to the problem and raises the question about why Amos would dye his rapier).

Well, see, Rapaire, the zucchini is, like, a metaphor. And the reason I used a rapier is because it extends my reach. After all, a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what is a "meta" for?

Anyway, the reality behind the metaphor was circumscribed with the point of my deadly blade, lo, these many lifetimes past, such that a small purple ring of scar tissue was left there around. Not only would the dastard not pay me for my inimitable skill, he withheld the tip as well! Yet, noblesse oblige and all that--I honorably refrained from carving my Zed trademark on the tip of said metaphorical vegetable.

Ah-ha! All of this happened in the distant past to a metaphorical zucchini! All is now clear.

Amos, I never realized that you were a mohel! Unless...perhaps...and I checked the ritual to be certain of this...you could be Little Hawk's father!!! (Alternately, you might be his mother but I don't think that's likely.)

Well, ordinarily I would salute your detective work, but it is fatally flawed, just like said zucchini. The unlikely circumcuision being discussed was unauthorized and spontaneous, you see. All formal categories of particpation were completely ignored, except for the deep Jungian ones of assailant and assailee.

Perhaps while Amos was on public display, he was forcedly given the zucchini from behind, stll held in the hands of the Hawkster, just after eating a meal of beets, explaining the public torment, humiliation and purple ring.

AH, Rustic, you have been too long away, too far apart; you have forgotten my nature altogether while wandering the wild northern woodlands. Particularly, you may recall that buggery of any sort is not in my quiver whatsoever. ANd although I am generally thought of as a sharp dude, that attribute does not extend to my sphincters; it was a steel blade that left his poor zucchini scarred, and nothing softer.

As for the Hawkster, I cannot say. Perhaps he has been a fudge-packer lo, these many incarnations. Such secrets are not mine to know.

And a good thing too! Goodness sakes, it was bad enough with the Cardinal's Guards snooping around all over the place, the Inquisition, and other unsavory scoundrels of that sort to contend with at that time.

Yes, they were hard times, and one had to make do without the formal comforts of modern civilization. But the joys were still there, sometimes more vividly than today. Let us not make a mohel out of a Montaigne.